Research-based educational publishing

Research-based educational publishing

Cambridge University Press works closely with academics at the University of Cambridge, and others around the world, to enhance its educational publishing.

As part of the University of Cambridge, we are uniquely positioned to transform key insights from research into impactful, real-world teaching and learning content; this means our approach to pedagogy, curriculum design, materials design and teacher training reflects the very latest in academic research into effective teaching and learning.

Cambridge Research Papers

We have commissioned a wide range of research-based papers into important pedagogical and educational policy issues, and we have made a number of them available here to the public.

Cambridge English Corpus

One of our strongest areas of research is into how we use and learn English. This research is based on huge collocations of language data, or language corpora, that we have built up over the past twenty years.

The largest of its kind in the world, the Cambridge English Corpus (CEC) is a multi-billion word collection of texts taken from a huge range of sources, including: newspapers, the internet, books, magazines, radio, schools, universities, the workplace and even everyday conversation - and is constantly being updated.

The CEC comprises several smaller corpora which allow us to look at different areas of language research more specifically. This includes the Cambridge Learner Corpus (CLC) which currently contains over 50 million words taken from Cambridge exam scripts submitted by over 220,000 students from 173 countries, and these numbers keep growing each year. The CLC allows us to conduct internationally relevant and country-specific research into how learners use English differently to expert speakers, as well as allowing us to analyse the different types of mistakes that learners make and what they get right. This research informs our ELT courses.We use our language research to:

• ensure that the language taught in our courses is natural, accurate and up-to-date.

• select the most useful, common words and phrases for a topic or level.

• focus on certain groups of learners and see what they find easy or hard.

• analyse spoken language so that we can teach effective speaking and listening strategies.